2024 has been quite the year for Meta and its XR ambitions; just as AI and the Apple Vision Pro took over headline space this year, Meta was underpinning its foothold on the XR market. Building on its AI-related work, Meta expanded its AR smart glasses strategy by debuting generation 2 Ray Ban glasses with improved AI features. Alongside this, Meta showcased its Orion Prototype, an AR smart glasses device highlighting the future of Meta immersive wearables.

Moreover, the firm’s AR hardware ambitions were further supported by its extended EssilorLuxottica partnership leading into the 2030s to reinforce the development of “multi-generational smart eyewear products.”

In a recent blog article, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth noted that Meta’s mixed reality hardware and AI glasses “reached a new level of quality and accessibility,” stating that “the stability of those platforms allows our software developers to move much faster on everything from operating systems to new AI features.”

Bosworth also added:

This is how I see the metaverse starting to come into greater focus and why I’m so confident that the coming year will be the most important one in the history of Reality Labs. 2024 was the year AI glasses hit their stride. When we first started making smart glasses in 2021 we thought they could be a nice first step toward the AR glasses we eventually wanted to build.

Meta sees the AR smart glasses market “as the natural evolution of today’s mobile computing platforms,” added Bosworth, who also stated the firm wants to “begin learning from the real world as soon as possible.”

In Meta’s recent Q3 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, noted that demand for smart glasses “continues to be very strong,” they also hightailed how Meta’s most recent edition of the AR device “sold out almost immediately and has been trading online for over $1,000.”

While these smart glasses are far from Project Orion, Meta is seemingly looking to scale this investment, leading to an AR smart glasses future. EssilorLuxottica reported strong demand for the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. In EU regions, the company found that 60% of Ray-Ban stores in the EU list these smart glasses as best-sellers.

Speaking on Project Orion, Bosworth explained:

But the real impact of Orion will be in the products we ship next and the ways it helps us better understand what people love about AR glasses and what needs to get better. We spent years working on user research, product planning exercises, and experimental studies trying to understand how AR glasses should work, and that work is what enabled us to build Orion. But the pace of progress will be much more rapid from here on out now that we have a real product to build our intuition around.

Bosworth notes that MR was a big step forward for Meta beyond its growing success with smart glasses. While the MR user base is not as rich as the niche but growing AR smart glasses group, Meta remains focused on the space, seemingly transitioning from solely VR headsets into the MR market.

The Meta Quest 3S debuted earlier this year, following Meta Connect, offering a lower-cost version of the MR device in a bid to increase adoption. For Meta Ray-Ban glasses, one can assume that improved sales figures correlate with the device’s ease of use and adoption compared to a bulkier kit.

However, smart glasses and MR headsets are two different markets that solve other issues, so they can only be compared briefly. For training and consumer gaming markets, the Quest MR headset range has improved hardware that achieves higher-fidelity shared immersive experiences.

Bosworth explained:

This is at the heart of what Meta is trying to achieve with Reality Labs and where the greatest potential of the metaverse will be unlocked: “the chance to create the most social platform ever” is how we described it when we first began working on it.

According to Bosworth, in 2024, two key elements came together to build the social MR focus: Horizon Worlds expanding and reaching mobile users and “next-generation Meta Avatars system[s].”

Meta is working to rebuild Meta Horizon after a slow launch during the Metaverse hype wave. With an MR and broader device-ready strategy in the works, “our vision for Horizon OS is to build a new kind of general-purpose computing platform capable of running every kind of software, supporting every kind of user, and open to every kind of creator and developer,” Bosworth added.